The dark years of singer and songwriter Steve Earle

Since 1995, singer-songwriter Steve Earle has been on an artistic tear, releasing a half-dozen critically acclaimed records, publishing a collection of short stories and writing a play about Karla Faye Tucker, a murderer executed in Texas in 1998.

It is a creative output that any artist would envy and that would be well worth documenting.

Yet Lauren St. John's "Hardcore Troubadour: The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle" concerns itself more with the years that preceded this amazing rush of work. In particular, St. John details the decade or so in which Earle was a junkie, trolling Nashville's depressed neighborhoods for crack cocaine and heroin, mortgaging his career for drugs and allowing his immense talent to mostly sit idle.

It is a dark and compelling tale, but it swamps the equally interesting story of Earle's recent work.

The son of an air-traffic controller and a mother who enjoyed torch songs and show tunes, Earle grew up in a tight-knit family in Texas and, early on, began to play the guitar. Just as early, he experimented with drugs.

He played small Texas honky-tonks and became influenced by some of the state's greatest singer-songwriters, including Guy Clark and Mickey Newbury, but especially the hard-living and self-destructive Townes Van Zandt.

Earle went to Nashville with the goal of releasing his first record by age 21. He missed by nearly a decade, but in the intervening years he honed his writing as Nashville tried to make sense of a singer-songwriter who worked in the capital of country music but played something altogether foreign. Earle called it hillbilly music, but it was an amalgam of rock and twang, influenced equally by the Rolling Stones and Hank Williams.

Then, in 1986, Earle released "Guitar Town," the kind of record on which a brash artist simply announces himself to the world. Earle did so with the words to the title track, "Hey pretty baby are you ready for me/It's your good rockin' daddy down from Tennessee." While Nashville and country music were awash in slick artists with little personality, "Guitar Town" bristled with energy and the power of Earle's mighty songwriting and his vital singing.

"Guitar Town" was a hit. It made critics' Top 10 lists and sold well. Nashville may have ignored Earle, but the music world outside Tennessee certainly took notice. Earle became the hillbilly version of Bruce Springsteen. Like Springsteen, Earle chronicled the down-and-outers and the working men and women struggling to get by, but with more of a twang than Springsteen.

But Earle quickly began to sink into drug addiction, his self-destructive tendencies controlling his life. He began and ended a series of marriages, usually leaving one for another in messy fashion. He fathered children and, by his own admission, neglected them for music and drugs--more and more often for the crack cocaine he smoked.

He also toured incessantly. It was as if he was more comfortable on the road than at home, St. John writes, as if he wanted the life a wife and child offered but just wanted to make sure they were back at home while he toured.

St. John devotes huge chunks of "Hardcore Troubadour" to Earle's drug use, his struggle to complete records and maintain his career--sometimes at the expense of friends, family and associates--and his disastrous relationships.

It is, at times, depressing reading, and Earle, who with his family and even some ex-wives cooperated in the project, is a painfully candid, though sometimes arrogant, interview subject. More than that, he often is not likable.

In the early 1990s, with his drug habit raging, Earle was barely getting by. He had spent much of his money. Opportunities had been lost. Once, Earle was given a plane ticket to New York, where he was to make a deal that would salvage his career. But Earle never made it: He sold the ticket and used the proceeds to get high.

Earle's sister Stacy, who often cared for him and now is a singer on her own, once wished he would die, his emotional pain was so desperate.

What saved Earle was jail. In 1994 he was sentenced to a year in jail for failing to appear in court on a heroin charge. When he finally turned himself in, he was locked up and forced to undergo withdrawal from the drugs. He also received treatment for his addiction.

He was released later that year, free of drugs and with several songs written, including the rollicking, brash "Hardcore Troubadour" and the sad, regretful "Goodbye." He recorded the album "Train a Comin' " in five days in January 1995, then followed it with an acoustic tour, including a brilliant, emotional date in Chicago that heralded Earle's return to the powerful form that had propelled "Guitar Town." Later that year, Earle finished the album "I Feel Alright," and it was clear he was on a roll.